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Spring 2008 - ActionLine

by Lee Hall - This article previously appeared in DissidentVoice.org | Spring 2008

Brutal Bureaucracies: Cloning Animals for Meat and Milk Okayed

Before the Bush administration goes, its many assaults to basic decency will include putting cloned farm animals on the planet. On the 15 th of January, the Food and Drug Administration made the United States the first country to approve animal cloning for the retail food industry.

The European Union is poised to follow along, clearing the way for international trade to accept clone-derived flesh and dairy products. One day after the U.S. approval, the European Food Safety Authority announced, “[A]ssuming that unhealthy clones are removed from entering the food chain, it is very unlikely that any difference exists in terms of food safety between food products originating from clones and their progeny compared with those derived from conventionally bred animals."

What are these people thinking?

The FDA is pushing this plan at the behest of a few heads of companies who promise replicas of animals most likely to be transformed into prime beef and bacon, or prolific milk producers. The dairy industry, which is already so prolific that taxpayers must buy surplus milk, has not championed the idea. Expecting to benefit most from the approval are the actual clonemakers, like Texas-based ViaGen, Inc., which is backed by a billionaire investor. ViaGen’s website boasts of cloning the “ legendary barrel racing champion Scamper” and shows “calves cloned from Kung Fu, the mother of many famous rodeo bulls.”

The Federation of Animal Science Societies has run a PR campaign for cloning. "The entertainment industry has used the word 'clone' in a negative context," said Jerry Baker, the group’s chief executive. "That's a hard one for us to overcome, but we have to continue to try." 1

While nonhuman cloning has always been legal in the United States, a voluntary moratorium on the sales of clones’ milk and flesh has applied since 2001. A 2002 National Academy of Science report concluded that products derived from cloned animals do not “present a food safety concern,” and the FDA gave a tentative approval in 2003, but retreated after its advisory panel reported a lack of consensus.

But they’ve gone and done it now.

"Meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as the food we eat every day," said Stephen Sundlof, the FDA’s head vet. Sounds like the vet from Hell. C lones die from respiratory, digestive, circulatory, nervous, muscular, skeletal and placental abnormalities. Cows die trying to bear grotesquely oversized calves. Piglets have been born without anuses and tails -- a fatal condition. Far more cloning attempts fail than succeed.2 A ll beside the point, Sundlof says. "There is just not anything there that is conceivably hazardous to the public health."

So there we have it: Cows, pigs and goats, our species has spoken. You’re cleared for cloning.3 Far be it for this government to have spent its time on actually helpful ideas, like cleaning up some of those toxic lagoons streaming from the many millions of farm animals already existing.

Rock Stars of the Barnyard

This month has seen a revival of the human cloning debate in light of some startling events. Not only did the CEO of a small California biotech company put DNA from his own skin into a human egg to begin the process of making human clones;4 additionally, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has just cleared the way for cow-human hybrid embryos to be created for disease research.5

The United Nations’ Declaration on Human Cloning asks member states to “prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.” The dignity of nonhuman life attracts far less notice. A widely cited series of polls carried out by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology reported that over 60 percent of U.S. consumers are uncomfortable with animal cloning, but only about 10 percent of those respondents saw the animals at the core of their discomfort.

The cloning companies dismiss their concerns with the most cavalier statements. “Cloning enhances animal wellbeing,” declares the Biotechnology Industry Organization; and Clonesafety.org, sponsored by cloning firms Cyagra, stART Licensing, and ViaGen, assures us: “In fact, clones are the ‘rock stars’ of the barnyard, and therefore are treated like royalty.”

With a strained informality, proponents speak of clones as later-born twins of their originals, and cloning as merely expanding the reproduction technology available to farmers since the 1950s.

Early last year, when a calf of a cloned cow was born in Britain, Simon Gee of the breeder’s group Holstein UK said the calf, Dundee Paradise, resulted from "conventional breeding technology" and was “born as the majority of the 220,000 animals that we register in the UK every year are born—as a result of artificial insemination.”6

But the majority of those registered animals don’t come from embryos imported from U.S. labs, as Dundee Paradise did.

Still, if domination and control is at the core of cloning, then the basis of the problem is the public’s willingness to consume animals in the first place. If animals can be bred, born and viewed as food items, virtually any manipulation will, sooner or later, be allowed. At a fundamental level, that’s why the statements from the Organic Consumers Association, or any other well-meaning group that declines to question the commodification of animals, lacks the power to stop this.

Cloners will even have the audacity to put on environmentalist airs. ViaGen, which currently charges $17,500 to clone a cow and $4,000 for a pig, and which, over the past few years, has provided more than 400 cloned animals to government scientists,7 has also mused about one day offering pro bono services to stave off extinctions. But any serious bid to protect vulnerable groups of animals would confront habitat degradation and other causes of accelerated extinction. And as scientists hope to soon routinely clone animals for agribusiness, they’re supporting the very industry that’s ruining habitats throughout the world.

Procedure Is Everything

Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski accused the U.S. government of acting "recklessly"; but Mikulski’s concern focused on the lack of labels to show which flesh and milk is which.8 The Biotechnology Industry Organization -- which represents the cloning companies -- said it would keep track of the animals. 9 Kind of. "The progeny of clones aren't clones, so there's really nothing to track anyway," ViaGen’s CEO has said.10

The European Commission has vowed to consult consumers before its final ruling in May. British supermarket chains are rushing to voice their policies against stocking cloned products, but how they’d identify products from clones’ offspring is a mystery.

A group whose role actually allows ethics to be considered did officially weigh in. After several months (months!) of internal meetings, of discussions with experts, and of gathering public views through the Internet, the European Group on Ethics of science and new technologies presented its opinion to the EC.11

But the opinion of the ethics group mainly focuses on food safety. It does want “consumer rights and freedoms” respected even as it invokes the Amsterdam Treaty (which views animals as sentient beings) and the World Organisation for Animal Health’s “five freedoms” for animals: to behave normally and avoid malnutrition, fear, physical discomfort, injury and disease. Freedom from cloners didn’t make the list.

The ethics bureaucrats ask the Commission to say whether patents will apply, and to regulate it all through a “Code of Conduct on responsible farm animal breeding, including animal cloning.”

But a glimmer of hope remains, says the Daily Mail: The recently appointed environment secretary, Hilary Benn, is “a vegetarian who takes the suffering of farm animals particularly seriously.”12

Sort of. Benn duly pledged to “wholeheartedly support beef, pork and chicken farmers and the meat industry” after being named Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs last summer."13

On the 19th of January, three days after the European Food Safety Authority gave its preliminary nod to cloned groceries, I visited Benn’s website, entered “cloning” into the search field, and watched the result appear.

3. The U.S. Department of Agriculture “is encouraging the technology producers to maintain their voluntary moratorium on sending milk and meat from animal clones into the food supply during this transition time." But suppliers aren’t expected to sell parts of cloned animals, who are seen as breeders. It’s the milk and meat from the cloned animals’ offspring that companies would be sending into the retail market.

5. Clive Cookson, “ Go-ahead for Hybrid Embryo Work” – Financial Times (18 Jan. 2008; reporting on the approval made public the day before).

6. Similarly, Biotechnology Industry Organization chief Jim Greenwood has said, " Animal cloning is the latest step in a long history of reproductive tools for farmers and ranchers, and can effectively help livestock producers deliver what consumers want: high-quality, safe, abundant and nutritious foods in a conscientious and consistent manner.” BIO press release: “FDA Announces Safety of Food Products from Cloned Animals and Their Offspring” (28 Dec. 2006).

9. See Andrew Pollack, “ System to Track Cloned Animals Is Planned” - New York Times (19 Dec. 2007). ViaGen and Trans Ova Genetics of Iowa claim to have devised an electronic registry system to track cloned animals for a substantial fee.